Tea and Tinka’s Teardrops

As you stood to leave, I could not collect the light reflecting from your eyes; I could only share the colors of the world, the fluid shimmering of rainbows, in the tear formed upon your cheek. You turned and your last smile I gathered in my hands, as a child holding a soapy bubble in the summer sun, in awe of its existence, barely aware of gossamer mortality.

Upon my fingers, stripes of salt where I brushed away the water from your eyes. I stir them now into my tea, and sip the memory how you would not say goodbye. You simply kissed me and then walked away into the vernal rain. I sat still and stared into my cup, reading the leaves, half believing their prognostications, listening to your absence, silent.

“Better strong than beautiful,” you said, but I am neither. I knew only what I had held, what I had let fly away into a future I no longer lived: gestures, words, the language of our bodies writing verse in space. We may never dance again. Time to close. Outside now, the way is clear of steps. Only impressions in the field where you have lately crossed my mind.